A full seven-months infant may be reared with proper feeding and skilled care; a six-months infant may be reared (with difficulty) in a hospital with skilled care. If it is certain that the removal of a six-months fetus will here and now save the life of a mother (a very difficult matter to judge by the best diagnosticians), this removal may be done, provided the infant is delivered in circumstances where skilled care, incubator, and proper food are obtainable; otherwise the removal is not justifiable.
The Council of Lerida, in Catalonia, in the year 524, decreed that abortionists of any kind must do penance all their lives, and if they are clerics they are to be suspended perpetually from all ecclesiastical ministration.
The Council of Worms, under Hadrian II., in the year 868,[91] also judged women who procure abortion as certainly guilty of murder.
In the _Corpus Juris_,[92] among the decretals of Gregory, there is the following law: "If any one, through lust or hatred, does anything to a man or woman, or gives them any drug, so that they cannot either generate or conceive, or bear children, he is to be treated as a murderer."
Sixtus V., in the Constitution _Effraenatam_, October 29, 1588, mentions a decree of the Sixth Synod of Constantinople, in session in 680 and 681, which subjects those who perform abortion, or kill a fetus, to the punishment inflicted on murderers. Sixtus then decreed that any one who effects the abortion, directly or indirectly, of an immature fetus, whether the fetus is animated, formed, or not, either by blows, poison, drugs, or potions, or tasks of hard labor imposed on pregnant women, or any other method, however subtle or obscure it be, is guilty of murder, and is to be punished accordingly. He recalls all ecclesiastical privileges from clerics who cause abortion, and says that they are to be reckoned as murderers according to the decree of the Council of Trent,[93] and he makes a law that abortionists may never be promoted to orders.
[93] Session xiv, _De Reformatione_, cap. 7.
In the fifth paragraph he says: "Moreover, we decree that the same penalties are incurred (1) by those who give potions and poisons to women to induce sterility or prevent conception, or who cause these drugs to be administered, and (2) by the women themselves who freely and consciously take these drinks."